Emmy Hennings, Gefängnis, Das graue Haus, Das Haus im Schatten

Author: Nicola Behrmann

The first volume of the Annotated Edition of the works and letters of Expressionist and Dadaist writer Emmy Hennings has appeared: Emmy Hennings, Gefängnis, Das graue Haus, Das Haus im Schatten. Co-edited by Professor Nicola Behrmann and Christa Baumberger, the volume combines three Hennings’ novels on the traumatic experience of imprisonment. It rediscovers her as one of the most impressive women writers in the early 20th century German literature (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2016).

Emmy Hennings Dada (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess)

The book offers a new take on the history of the Dada movement in Zurich and contains many archival documents, photographs, and biographical information. For their editorial work, the authors received the Award "Schätze heben" by the Swiss foundation Migros Kulturprozent.

Three Rutgers students and Aresty Research Assistants—Camille Lathbury, Kelsey Haddorff, and Fiona Wong—worked closely with Professor Behrmann to complete research in German on the book. Check out a recent radio interview with Professor Behrmann on DeutschlandradioKultur.

How We Learn Where We Live: Thomas Bernhard, Architecture and Bildung (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2015).

Examines the relationship between buildings and Bildung in the works of Thomas Bernhard, with chapters on the Austrian architectural neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, the cabinet of art and curiosities in Castle Ambras and the Art History Museum Vienna, as well as the Ludwig-Wittgenstein-House in Vienna.

Das unerhörte Wort: Antisemitismus in Literatur und Kultur

A Weak Messianic Power

Author: Michael Levine

A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida and Celan, Fordham University Press, 2013.

In his famous theses on the philosophy of history, Benjamin writes: “We have been endowed with a weak messianic power to which the past has a claim.” This claim addresses us not just from the past but from what will have belonged to it only as a missed possibility and unrealized potential. For Benajmin, as for Celan and Derrida, what has never been actualized remains with us, not as a lingering echo but as a secretly insistent appeal. Because such appeals do not pass through normal channels of communication, they require a special attunement, perhaps even a mode of unconscious receptivity. Levine examines the ways in which this attunement is cultivated in Benjamin’s philosophical, autobiographical, and photohistorical writings; Celan’s poetry and poetological addresses; and Derrida’s writings on Celan.

The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture

Author: Martha Helfer

The Word Unheard: Legacies of Anti-Semitism in German Literature and Culture, Northwestern University Press, 2011.

The Belated Witness

Author: Michael Levine

The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival, Stanford University Press, 2006.

The Belated Witness stakes out an original place within the field of recent work on the theory and practice of literary writing after the Holocaust. Drawing in productive and unsettling ways from converging work in history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, the book asks how the events of the Holocaust force us to alter traditional conceptions about human experience, as well as the way we can now talk and write about such experiences. Rather than providing a mere account of an outside or inside reality, literature after the Holocaust sets itself a more radical task: it testifies to unspeakable experiences in a specific mode of address, a call or summons to another in whose sole power resides the possibility of a future response to such testimonies of world-historical trauma.